Transients are electrical manifestations of sudden changes in circuit conditions (switching, faults, etc.). While the science of transients has roots in the late 1800's, modern research efforts and applications focus on power quality disturbances on electrical power grids using invasive electronic techniques.
Improvements have been made in detecting power quality disturbances. However, the hardware associated with detecting power quality disturbances is invasive, requiring the insertion of devices into existing and new infrastructure. Algorithms and techniques to analyse and address power quality disturbances, such as probabilistic neural networks and fully-informed particle swarms, have been used in industry and academia to interface with radio frequency (RF) equipment and electronics to correlate with existing power grid infrastructures.
Passive, remote-sensing, optical cameras have been recently shown to extract vibration signatures using optical modulation techniques. However, no such systems exist to remotely detect power quality disturbances. In addition, such systems have not been able to classify the information captured by optical cameras.
In view of the above, it would be desirable to have a remote optical sensing system for detecting power quality disturbances. It would further be desirable to have such a system be able to classify the detected power quality disturbances.